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Gaming
We grade the reworked League of Legends tanks
Sejuani, Zac and Maokai’s first week of school is over, so find out who came out as the tank on top.
Riot’s latest trio of midweight reworks focuses on League of Legend’s tanks, a class that hasn’t yet received the same broad spectrum renovation as the assassins or mages. First up are Zac, Sejuani, and Maokai, all of which were crying out for the kind attention of Riot’s designers.
But how have they fared now that they’ve been roaming the live servers for more than a week? We deliberately reserved judgement for a while, getting to grips with their changes in order to assign grades based on their performance in the wild. Read on for our field report.
Sejuani: A+
Does League have a new ice queen?
© Riot Games
As far as the new and improved Sejuani is concerned, call us impressed. Her new kit gives the beastmaster things to do when her ultimate is on cooldown and captures, in a far more satisfying manner, the delight of hammering frozen enemies to pieces.
The best thing about Sejuani 2.0 is her newfound rhythm: the mounting one-two-three-four of Frost stacks, the snap freeze, the shatter as enemies are encased in ice and subsequently battered out of it. Riot is well practised at constructing these mini crests of tension, and it shows. Each engagement is a delight because of the prospect of a knockup, freeze, smash, freeze smash is always tantalisingly close.
She’s just got so many delicious options for starting a fight. Three abilities include hard CC, and when they’re all off cooldown, she’s a one-woman army of crowd control, able to lock down single targets, multiple enemies, and anything else that gets in front of those terrifying tusks.
There’s no way around it: she’s an absolute monster. Smashing enemies out of ice at the highest levels deals damage equal to 20 percent of the target’s maximum health in a single blow. In terms of durability she’s still not the hardest to kill of her tanky peers (we’ve died playing her, a lot), but the three seconds of gargantuan armor and magic resist afforded by Frost Armor at levels 14+ are enough to negate a tonne of damage at the beginning of fights.
Sejuani is reborn, may she terrorise the lanes in pro and amateur play for a long while to come.
Maokai: B-
Maokai’s got one new, enormous trick to show off
© Riot Games
Oh Maokai, whatever shall we make of you. Before his makeover, the green menace was reliable, but his style of play felt underwhelming. Damage mitigation over long periods of time is impactful in team fights, but it’s hardly a recipe for a dopamine rush.
Riot understood and amended accordingly. The treant’s new ultimate, a shoal of vines screaming through the ground, is more thematically appropriate than the magical fairy field of yore, but more importantly, it’s feels impactful. You cast it, plants go whoosh, people get tangled, and hopefully, champions go splat.
In spite of the initial learning curve in delivering Nature’s Grasp – it slowly speeds up and is therefore, in most situations, is an exceedingly poor tool for chasing – it’s a truly impactful ultimate, We’ll overlook for now that it’s pretty much Zyra’s Grasping Roots and Nami’s Tidal wave; the thing feels just about unique enough to not seem like it’s treading on another champion’s toes. Or fins.
So how does Maokai’s rework rank? Experience tells us that he definitely feels more impactful from a player perspective – but at the cost of his general utility as a damage soak in late game teamfights.
We were never really in love with you before Maokai, and honestly, we’re not sure there’s enough here to bring non-Maokaiers come into the fold.
Zac: C+
The blob returns
© Riot Games
Riot didn’t feel that Zac was delivering on his fantasy of… being a giant blob of goo, so he’s received a new Q, and a completely reworked ultimate.
Zac still feels very much like Zac. His pattern mostly consists of flinging himself into fights and attempting to sow chaos, but this actually proves more difficult than before, as his new ultimate, which lets him scoop up enemies, doesn’t activate instantly. If you can land it, then there are all kinds of nasty possibilities for dragging enemies into the loving arms of a tank or under a tower, but all too often we’ve found that potential captives escape the area of effect before we can deliver them unto our team.
Stretching Strikes, which has been pluralised to indicate that he now sends out two sets of strikes rather than one, now brings two targeted enemies together. Smashing skulls should be glorious, but the distance travelled between enemies is often small and it’s an easy ability to waste on enemies which are clustered together.
Zac now has more options for controlling the battlefield, but we’ve found his kit the most frustrating of the the three reworks. He’s likely to remain an acquired taste.
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